First-ever retrospective of the photographer Philip Mechanicus
25 April 2013

Exhibition: Philip Mechanicus: Photographer

The first exhibition to survey the work of the Amsterdam
photographer Philip Mechanicus will open at the Jewish Historical
Museum on 24 May.The exhibition offers an
overview of Mechanicus's many-faceted photographic work.Along with many portraits of writers, actors, and artists,
it includes street photographs that he took in and around
Waterlooplein in Amsterdam, as well as examples of his independent
work and commercial photography.

Philip Mechanicus (1936-2005) developed a unique personal style
over his career as a photographer, showing an almost un-Dutch
fascination with aesthetics, form and structure. Mechanicus was
best known for his black-and-white portraits of figures from the
cultural world, such as Matthijs van Nieuwkerk, Marlene Dumas and
Remco Campert. In a time when snapshot-like portrait photographs
were all the rage, these austere, posed studio portraits became his
trademark. From the 1960s onwards, his photographs were published
frequently in leading newspapers and magazines, such as
Hollands Diep and NRC Handelsblad.

Mechanicus grew up in Amsterdam's old Jewish quarter. Thanks to
his parents' mixed marriage, they and their children - Philip and
his four sisters - survived the war. Philip's mother came from
Germany and was not Jewish. Young Philip took an evening course at
Amsterdam's school of applied arts (now the Gerrit Rietveld
Academie) and received his photographic training from 1956 to 1959
as an assistant to the photographer Ad Windig. After that, he
rapidly established his reputation as an independent photographer,
with many assignments in the areas of journalism, advertising,
portraiture, and exhibitions. In 1965, he won the City of
Amsterdam's Photo Prize.

In the late 1950s and early 60s, Mechanicus took many
photographs in the Waterlooplein neighbourhood where he had grown
up, wandering the streets there for hours at a time with a borrowed
Rolleiflex camera. He had an eye for the melancholy atmosphere of
the deserted streets, but also for the high spirits of the children
at play there, for whom the ruined neighbourhood and its heaps of
rubble formed the ideal playground. It was not until many years
later, in the 1980s and 90s, that Mechanicus presented some of
these street photographs to the public, and even now a large number
have never been exhibited or published.

The exhibition Philip Mechanicus: Photographer
consists of around 150 photographs, mainly vintage prints, from the
collections of the Jewish Historical Museum, the Maria Austria
Instituut, the writer K. Schippers (a very close friend of
Mechanicus's), Maarten van Haaff (Mechanicus's assistant), and
others. This exhibition is a joint production of the Jewish
Historical Museum, the Stichting Philip Mechanicus, and the Maria
Austria Instituut.

The publishing house of Lubberhuizen has produced the
accompanying photo book Het straatjongens book ('The
street urchins' book'), with some 70 photos of children in the
streets of Amsterdam, taken by Philip Mechanicus in the 1950s and
60s. It includes an introduction (in Dutch) by the writer Auke Kok.
The price of the book is €12.95.